Suicide bombing

A suicide bombing is a form of suicide attack in which the attacker blows himself up with the intention of killing as many other people as possible. The first known suicide bomber was Ignacy Hryniewiecki on 13 March 1881, when he assassinated Czar Alexander II of Russia. The tactic of suicide bombing was employed en masse during the 1930s and 1940s by the Kuomintang's "dare to die corps" during the Second Sino-Japanese War (during which they wielded swords in battle and wore grenade suicide vests) and Japan's kamikaze fighters during World War II (during which they crashed their planes into US Navy ships), and the tactic would become a more accurate alternative to throwing bombs at targets. During the Korean War, both North Korea and South Korea used suicide bombers with satchel charges to destroy enemy tanks, and North Korean suicide bomber Li Su-bok became a hero for his attack.

However, it would not be until the 1980s that suicide bombings became one of the most recognizable terrorist tactics. In 1983, the Islamic Jihad Organization sent two suicide bombers (including Ismail Ascari) to carry out suicide truck bombings against the US Marine Corps and French Chasseurs barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, and the suicide bomber became a deadly tool for terrorists worldwide. The tactic was seen in the Lebanese Civil War (during which the first female suicide bomber, Sana'a Mehaidli, blew herself up in 1985), the Tamil Tigers' insurgency in Sri Lanka, and the Kurdish PKK insurgency in Turkey during the 1980s, and Palestinians began to use the tactic in 1989 at the start of the First Intifada, while al-Qaeda used the tactic during the 1990s. In 2001, al-Qaeda launched the deadliest suicide bombings in history in the 9/11 attacks, killing 2,977 people. During the Second Intifada, it was reported that Fatah, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad opened "paradise camps" to teach children as young as eleven to become suicide bombers, recruiting more terrorists. During the US wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, suicide attacks became a normal feature of the war, with Iraq seeing 1,938 suicide bombings from 2003 to 2015. From 1981 to 2015, 4,814 suicide attacks in over 40 countries had killed over 45,000 people, and the rate grew from three attacks a year in the 1980s to one a month in the 1990s, one a week from 2001 to 2003, to one a day from 2003 to 2015. From 1981 to 2006, they constituted only 4% of terrorist attacks, but they were responsible for 32% of terrorism deaths, with 90% of suicide bombings occurring in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Before 2003, most suicide bombings were carried out by nationalists or soldiers, but they are now mostly associated with Islamist terrorists seeking to become martyrs.